What Trauma Taught Me About Resilience: Charles Hunt (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Charles Hunt’s talk titled “What Trauma Taught Me About Resilience” at TEDxCharlotte conference.

In his TEDx talk, Charles Hunt recounts his challenging upbringing in Oakland, California, during the 1980s, a time marked by high unemployment, systemic racial issues, and the crack epidemic. He shares vivid, traumatic childhood experiences, including dealing with his mother’s addiction and his father’s incarceration and subsequent death. Despite these adversities, Hunt succeeded academically and professionally, becoming the first in his family to graduate college and enjoying a successful corporate career.

His journey illustrates the concept of resilience, which he defines as the ability to adapt to and recover from negative life changes. Hunt emphasizes that resilience is not just about being strong or thick-skinned; it’s about how beliefs and thoughts shape our actions and responses to challenges. He advocates for the power of a positive attitude and perspective in overcoming life’s obstacles, stressing the importance of acknowledging past victimhood while refusing to remain a victim.

Hunt concludes by expressing gratitude for his experiences, seeing them as instrumental in shaping his resilience and giving purpose to his trauma.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

What if I told you that you could overcome anything, that there’s no circumstance or situation known to man that you cannot overcome, that you are indeed unbreakable. Would you believe me? And more importantly than me telling you, if you told yourself those things, would you believe you? I want to talk to you about a critical element of happiness, success, and overcoming obstacles: resilience, and how it’s built through some of the most painful moments.

Early Life Challenges

I’m not sure what the ideal route to a TED Talk is, but I’m guessing that my journey isn’t it. I was born and raised in Oakland, California, coming of age in the 1980s, and its nearly 20% unemployment rate for blacks, systemic housing segregation and discrimination, education inequities, high poverty and murder rates, and the dawn of the crack epidemic, and its partner, the war on drugs, that made historical criminal justice inequities even worse.

Against that backdrop, I also came of age with a mother who would become an addict, and a father who, though his listed occupation on my birth certificate says custodian, he was also a pimp. Despite their flaws and doing the best that they could in the situation that exploited the worst of themselves, I knew that my parents loved me to pieces, and I loved them to pieces.

Childhood Traumas

My mom had custody of me as we moved and settled into Acorn Housing Projects in West Oakland. It’s during a three-year period between age 7 and 10 years old that some of the most traumatic, yet vivid moments of my childhood would play out, as my mother’s disease of addiction took root. When I close my eyes, I see them all just as clearly today as they happened decades ago.

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By the time I discover my mother’s boyfriend, eyes wide open, laying on the floor of a drug overdose, a discovery that initially paralyzed me in fear much in the same way that his body laid motionless at my feet as he blankly stared at the ceiling.

Pivotal Moments

Like the day my mother sat me down on my bed to read me a handwritten letter that my dad had written and sent me in the mail. It would be the first time I’d ever heard the five-syllable word incarcerated and learned what it meant. Like the day my grandmother, who took over raising me when we were evicted out of the projects due to my mother’s addiction, received a call to inform me that my father, after being jumped in a prison fight, was brain dead. He would die later that night before I ever saw him again alive.

Like the times I would later visit my own mother in jail, a hazy plexiglass window separating us physically and emotionally while also serving to remind me of the fate that my father met in those very walls.

Overcoming Adversity

I felt the pain, the sadness, the shame, the solitude, the adjectives that as a preteen meet the clinical definitions of depression. Yet, when I opened my eyes, the worst of life couldn’t take out the best of me, because I’m still standing here in front of you. Despite being truly disadvantaged, I stand here in front of you having overcome all those things and more. I would emerge as the first in my family to graduate college, earning undergraduate and master’s business degrees.

Then on to a nearly two-decade corporate career before starting my own venture. I went from the projects to exploring a couple dozen countries across the world. From poverty to being the furthest from broke and broken that I’ve ever been. From tragedy to triumph, I have overcome, and even already, I have succeeded.

The Essence of Resilience

Now, I could entertain and engross you in a fascinating story of how, but that’s not nearly as important as a different question. Why? Why do I and others still succeed and flourish despite immense pain and trauma? Those people and myself, they aren’t just strong or thick-skinned or good at compartmentalizing. What they are is resilient. You see, change is a constant in life. Nothing gives us immunity from it.

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Resilience is the capacity to adapt to negative change and recover from it as quickly as possible. Now, note that I said negative change. You typically don’t need any help in coping with positive change. You get the job that you interviewed for, and it comes with a 30% pay increase. Or, you find out class is canceled the day that you have an exam that you haven’t prepared for. Oh, it’s a bunch of A students in here, right? It’s just me. Okay.

Coping with Adversity

Well, those are really good things, and so you don’t need any help or strategies on how to cope with the good fortune.

It’s the negative things, the hurtful things, the bad things in life where our level of resilience matters. How we process, respond to, and act will have huge implications on where the story goes from there, whether we succumb to it or we surmount it. But, understand, to exercise resilience, some change in circumstances must have happened, must have happened.

The idea is to understand your belief system. Your beliefs impact your feelings. Your feelings impact how you think about things, and your thoughts ultimately impact how you act and respond. I discovered this truth not through some bolt from the clouds, some specific aha moment, but from going through and escaping my own hell as a youngster.

There were some excruciatingly painful, gut-wrenching days, days where I didn’t even know how I was going to move forward, and the only thing that I could cling to was an irrational hope, a belief that tomorrow would be better than today, sometimes without even really truly believing it myself.

Building Resilience

But there I was, trying to make each moment better than the next, today better than tomorrow, without sacrificing my future for today’s pain. Even at a young age, and despite not knowing what scholars and researchers were already confirming, I was laying the foundation of resilience by using the most important resource available to me, my mind. I wish I could say that the bad luck truck stopped dropping boxes of trauma off at my doorstep when I was a kid, but life doesn’t adhere to any delivery windows.

Change comes whenever it comes, and for as long as we all live. After my childhood, I’d go on to experience the death of family and friends, job loss, financial issues, health crisis, all the things that life has a tendency to throw at us. To show you how much of a comedian God is, he gave me a breakup, heartbreak, and distraction to start this very week as I was preparing to talk to you about resilience.

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Trauma and Resilience

Like, really? Now? Now? So what does trauma teach us about resilience? Sometimes we need to tell ourselves what to think when our mind starts telling us things that we don’t need to hear. That you can and will overcome and succeed, and not just in spite of, but precisely because of. That with the proper perspective and a positive attitude, we have power.

That life is easier when you’re prepared, and just because you can’t plan for everything doesn’t mean you can’t be ready for something. That perspective sometimes requires partnership and perseverance and understanding. Sometimes it gets hard, and it’s tough, and it’s painful. You get tired, you get weak, and when you don’t know how to keep going, sometimes all the strength you need is the strength to ask others for help.

That it’s okay to acknowledge that I was a victim, but refuse to own being a victim. That it’s okay to acknowledge that I was a victim, but refuse to own being a victim. You get that subtle distinction, that difference between past and present tense? That gives us power. Power to change the way we think, power to change our circumstances, and ultimately power to overcome.

Everything Happens for a Reason

Because of my faith, I’ve long been a believer that everything happens for a reason. Some reasons are immediately available to you, others take time to reveal themselves. As I was piecing together my talk, one of the central questions I kept coming back to was, who am I talking to? I ultimately realized that I was talking to the adolescent me, the college me, the professional me, even the future me with life adversities yet to be encountered.

The varying versions of me is who I was telling, you are indeed unbreakable, that you can overcome anything. But, if you happen to find a little something in your eavesdropping to help you through whatever adversity you face, then I was talking to the adolescent you, the college you, the corporate you, the professional you, the future you, too. And more than anything, I thank you for giving my trauma a purpose. Thank you.